Business
Paid Content : This paid content was written and produced by RV Studios of Red Ventures' marketing unit in collaboration with the sponsor and is not part of ZDNET's Editorial Content.
Home Business Enterprise Software

12 Days of ‘Staircase Wit’ for 2013 (Day 3)

Rather than end the year with a ‘best of’ list or predictions for 2014, I’ll be delivering 12 days of holiday gifts to you in the form of treppenwitz: all the smart afterthoughts I had all year.

Treppenwitz or perhaps more correctly ‘l’esprit de l’escalier’ is the expression for when you think of the perfect thing to say, but long after the moment you should have said it. In this series of blogs I given myself a second chance to comment or correct topics I’ve covered this year.

March

Will Retail Payments Be the Killer App for Mobile Wallets?

Mobile Wallets seem to be a mirage, at least in the West, somehow being both closer and further away than ever. The Isis Mobile Wallet, which I first used in Austin, TX at SXSW, finally launched nationwide in the US , whilst Google both ditched the NFC requirement, and brought back its physical debit card that attaches to a Wallet account.

Why Operators Are Launching LTE? (Hint: It’s Not Download Speeds)

LTE deployments have sped up during 2013. Telecom Asia interviewed mobile operators across the world about the next generation services such as LTE, RCS, VoLTE and topics such as RAN and QoS. Here’s what they found out:

Top drivers for LTE

  • It’s still (mostly) about speed, in a data-hungry age, though…
  • A third see new services as the top driver
  • Few operators see it as a way to beat competition, as the technology is not a competitive advantage.

The main benefits of IPX connections are that it provides a private, managed, and secure network, and opportunities for new commercial models, as operators are looking at different business models for LTE. Connection consolidation is lower on the list.

What about the speed of adoption?

  • 56% of operators are connected to IPX, a number significantly higher than the 30% operators who were connected at the time of our 2011 IPX report
  • The technology requirement for IP, the customer desire, and the local access network are there
  • Operators are not willing to put traffic on an internet platform. They need a higher standard of service quality and a well-defined network to carry different kind of apps and services
  • More operators are interested in IPX now, and it will grow quickly now that there is greater demand for data connectivity driven by end user needs and expectations, and latency critical apps
  • But many operators are one-to-three years away from deploying IPX.

The full results of the survey are in this free report.

Editorial standards
Show Comments